People have been asking for a Vanilla server for a long time now. That quote is from the old forums, which are no longer available. When Tom Chilton stands up and loudly declares a vanilla server can’t be done and, even if it could be, that nobody would really want it, I believe his real motivation is encapsulated above. That has always been the sense of things that I have taken from the company and its statements. They want to move forward, that today is always better than yesterday, and that tomorrow will be better still.

That quote at the top was posted less than three months after the Cataclysm expansion removed the original 1-60 game content of Azeroth. But it was brought forward from the old forums, so it certainly pre-dates Cataclysm. The whole vanilla server idea isn’t new. It didn’t just come up this month. Customers asking for it isn’t new. Blizzard saying “no” isn’t new. Even this reminder that Blizzard knew people wanted the old world back when it was still current and available, yet decided to do nothing with it until enough time passed to allow Tom Chilton to say it is too hard isn’t even that new.

A day that will live in infamy…

What is new, what has sparked this constant smoldering hum of people asking for some sort of classic server… probably since The Burning Crusade launched… into an actual conflagration was Blizzard going after a private/pirate vanilla server that was an outlet for 150K players looking for that old school experience.

Serving the Nostalrius server with a cease and desist notice got people stirred up and brought the question of classic servers, long simmering, to a full boil. We got a few choice blog posts in our corner of the internet when this kicked off:

Blizzard immediately tried to dismiss the whole thing in the way they always have. However, the tide was already rushing in and, in a world where 5 million subscriptions, down from 10 million a little over a year ago, is the new normal somebody, and the game missed bringing in a billion dollars in revenue for the first time in a long stretch, somebody at Blizzard apparently decided that they might want to listen to that increasingly loud segment of the World of Warcraft fan base.

It starts out with a statement that Blizzard’s silence on the subject shouldn’t be taken as a lack of attention on their part. After years of silence, punctuated by terse and glib dismissals of the idea, that seems a bit disingenuous. I mean, I have your pre-Cataclysm quotes handy if you want them. So I will take it as read that there has suddenly been enough noise of late that they are actually taking the idea seriously for the first time.

That is followed up by a statement that Blizzard has to protect its IP and doesn’t know how to grant Nostalrius any sort of license to operate that would also protect the World of Warcraft brand. I might suggest they check out what SOE did with Project 1999, but Blizzard hasn’t been interested in copying EverQuest since 2005 or so. So Nostalrius will likely remain dead.

Then there is the return to why Blizzard won’t do a classic server; because it is hard. If it were easy, of course they would do it, but it isn’t, so they won’t. Pre-Cataclysm Azeroth is forever gone from Blizzard servers.

Blizz has never been a company to take a step in a direction that hasn’t been well trod or to take big steps when little steps would do. So them jumping to a Vanilla server, even if they could get past the mental block and do it without too much cost, seems unlikely.

I think they would first venture into an alternate rules server test, something like a “hard mode” server. Crank up MOB damage and hit points, tone down exp gain, normal mode dungeons tuned up to not be face rolls, no transfers or insta-level characters, no heirlooms, flying restricted to only in Outland after 60 70 and Northrend after 68, 78 and some bits and pieces like that. Throw in some special achievements… or maybe just a gold border on current achievements that you get when you do them in hard mode, and I bet that would be a draw.

That is, after all, pretty much all SOE is doing with their nostalgia servers.

I think there is some merit in that option. A fresh server experience with some differences and greater difficulty with everybody starting off at level 1 would be a draw for some. Bhagpuss has said in the past that he wouldn’t want to play what would be simply a more difficult version of the same content available on live servers. And that is a legitimate point of view, certainly. But some people would. I bet a lot of people would.

Yes, I know, that isn’t vanilla. While I actually like some of the 1-60 Cataclysm content myself, having run through every zone now for my attempt at the Loremaster achievement, it still isn’t the same. It isn’t old Westfall, old Deadmines, old Stranglethorn Vale with its myriad of pages to collect, or old Sunken Temple with its long series of challenges.

But it might be a start, a step in the right direction, an admission by Blizzard that their same old routine of the last eleven years of an expansion every two years with a one year content drought can’t just go on indefinitely. Maybe they are finally feeling the need to do something different, to offer up a server that isn’t PvE, PvP, PvE-RP, or PvP-RP.

World of Warcraft is still the cash cow at Blizzard. It still has a big team. It still could make a billion dollars a year in revenue if it could attract back some of the lapsed player base with something a little different. Maybe this is the first step to vanilla.

I doubt it. I think that so long as Tom Chilton is calling the shots, Blizzard will continue down its standard path. (He is becoming the Blizzard version of Smed when it comes to quotes, especially after calling Garrisons the WoW version of housing.) But it could happen.

Is today’s post a sign of a shift at Blizzard, or an attempt to calm people down and hope the whole issue goes away once the Warcraft movie premiers and the WoW Legion expansion launches?

We wanted to let you know that we’ve been closely following the Nostalrius discussion and we appreciate your constructive thoughts and suggestions.

Our silence on this subject definitely doesn’t reflect our level of engagement and passion around this topic. We hear you. Many of us across Blizzard and the WoW Dev team have been passionate players ever since classic WoW. In fact, I personally work at Blizzard because of my love for classic WoW.

We have been discussing classic servers for years – it’s a topic every BlizzCon – and especially over the past few weeks. From active internal team discussions to after-hours meetings with leadership, this subject has been highly debated. Some of our current thoughts:

Why not just let Nostalrius continue the way it was? The honest answer is, failure to protect against intellectual property infringement would damage Blizzard’s rights. This applies to anything that uses WoW’s IP, including unofficial servers. And while we’ve looked into the possibility – there is not a clear legal path to protect Blizzard’s IP and grant an operating license to a pirate server.

We explored options for developing classic servers and none could be executed without great difficulty. If we could push a button and all of this would be created, we would. However, there are tremendous operational challenges to integrating classic servers, not to mention the ongoing support of multiple live versions for every aspect of WoW.

So what can we do to capture that nostalgia of when WoW first launched? Over the years we have talked about a “pristine realm”. In essence that would turn off all leveling acceleration including character transfers, heirloom gear, character boosts, Recruit-A-Friend bonuses, WoW Token, and access to cross realm zones, as well as group finder. We aren’t sure whether this version of a clean slate is something that would appeal to the community and it’s still an open topic of discussion.

One other note – we’ve recently been in contact with some of the folks who operated Nostalrius. They obviously care deeply about the game, and we look forward to more conversations with them in the coming weeks.

You, the Blizzard community, are the most dedicated, passionate players out there. We thank you for your constructive thoughts and suggestions. We are listening.

23 thoughts on “Will Nostalrius Drama Shift the Sleeping WoW Giant?”

Me personally I wouldn’t play on a vanilla server, the game itself back then despite the rose colored glasses of nostalgia had a lot of issues. I don’t miss the game, what I do miss is the people, that made that part of the game so much fun for me, and that I will never get back. Too much time has passed too many people have moved on, hell I don’t even think half of my original guild still plays.

I can see where Blizzard is coming from and why they want to move ever onwards, the problem is they move too damn slow. I think a lot of the devs feel as I do and just can’t see the draw for it. Still there is obviously a demand for it 150k people is nothing to sneeze at. If it were any other MMO 150k joining or leaving could mean the difference between continued existence or shutting down.

Also GTFO of here with it would be too resource intensive to run a nostalgia server, if a bunch of unpaid people can run a server with 150k people on it I think Blizzard could manage.

And maybe the part where they are talking to those who were responsible for Nostalrius will bear some fruit.

And for those who are saying Blizzard is a huge ass for closing it down keep in mind they could have sued the people behind Nostalrius into debt for the rest of their natural lives so going with a simple cease and desist was rather nice of them.

I’ce played a lot of Diablo 3, I’ve also played a lot of Diablo 1 and 2 as well as large amounts of Path of Exile. I’ve done my time in hearthstone and heroes of the storm as well as playing a lot of league of legends/clash royale (even quite a bit of mgt). And I’ve been playing MMOs for 15 years including vanilla-wrath in wow with a few wasted hours in cata and garrisons online.

In my humble opinion blizzard has simply forgotten how to make good games.

They produce game with extreme production value and they really fine tune the gameplay into what their focus groups and years of research is telling them is right, but the result is shallow games which aren’t fun.

Sure you can ride the addiction or the social aspects, but at the core of it is gameplay which just isn’t fun.

The classic server drama illustrates why. They stopped making games they themselves want to play, and because they don’t play their own games they fully fail to understand why someone would want to play on a classic server.

I agree its probably just a way to appease those clamoring for a vanilla server until the hype simmers down. But I also agree this pristine server idea is a step in the right direction for Blizzard, if they are truly considering it.

And, I honestly do question how many people really would want, longterm that is, i.e. more than just a stroll down memory lane adventure for a few months, old classes, old abilities, etc. I realize there are some good things that got thrown out along the way and classes have become far too homogenized, etc., but overall I think people just want a challenge again. At least, that is what I want. I want a reason to group to develop some community (other than queuing to faceroll 5-mans or LFR), vanilla-like leveling and challenging 5 man dungeons. I don’t want to go back to refreshing my seals/buffs every 3 min. and carrying around hundreds of arrows or deal with old bugs that have been fixed. To me, it is not about the specific content/classes that was available in vanilla WoW. Rather, it is more about creating an environment where the same and/or similar experiences can be had. This is not possible on live, but it should be possible with a “pristine server” type of environment.

I would play on a pristine server. I think this would appease most folks, but I know it would not appease everyone. However, knowing Blizzard they’ll make it into this huge project, spend millions of dollars researching its viability, tweaking the server rules, internal alpha testing, etc., and then cancel the project after 1-2 years of testing saying they couldn’t get it where they wanted it to be.

They could literally do a pristine server next week if they wanted to. Why not just try it? The whole “We aren’t sure whether this version of a clean slate is something that would appeal to the community and it’s still an open topic of discussion” seems like bullshit to me. Just do it. Throw the server up there. If it works out, keep it and open more. If it doesn’t, scrap it and try something else. How complicated is this?

I think it would be a step in the right direction for Blizzard to test the waters with different server types without much risk. If it works out, maybe they’d be willing to try a progression server, or some other type, and/or eventually a true classic server.

Not optimistic it will happen anytime soon though. So, I guess for now I’ll just look forward to Uthgard’s relaunch coming up with beta starting on May 7.

If Blizzard wants everyone to experience the story (see the content they worked so hard on)as it is told in Raids, instead of handing out actual rewards for the LFR, let it be a faceroll, and remove all reason for true raiders would ever have to do it. Get rid of the gear, Get rid of tokens/points that would let you buy gear, see how many people ACTUALLY care about what they miss in raids.

That would return some of the feeling of being special for having successfully raided. Keep that gear exclusive to the true raid level type players. And no I am not one of those elite level players, I have raided yes, but never been at the forefront of it and liked doing it mostly for the since of comraderie that build sup around raid teams.

The 150k Nostalrius accounts included some percentage who were in the middle of their nostalgia tour and hadn’t quit yet. The actual number of long term Nostalrius players was lower. It just means that the business case isn’t quite “run vanilla server, get 150k extra subscriptions.”

MMO Champion has a poll up about whether you’d play on a “pristine” server, and it’s running about 50/50 at the moment. Running this sort of server is more attractive since it doesn’t require unpacking and supporting legacy code. At the end of the day, Blizzard is a business and if there is a business case for doing this they will.

Put up something half assed that no one wants, then use it as further evidence that you’re right, no one wants a vanilla server. This is funnier than any of their April fool’s jokes. I’m glad I’m paying for my sub with gold because giving Blizzard money at this point makes me feel gross. Awful people.

@Matt – 150K players… or 800K players over the life of the server… tracked this server down, got an old version of the client, set up an account with some random unknowns on the internet, and then committed to playing on an imperfect reproduction of the original that was of dubious legality at best and could disappear at any time. If you’re trying to say that this is the measure which Blizzard should use and that 150K players is the top end they could possibly expect should they set up a supported and legal version of the original content, I am going to suggest you haven’t thought this through, or that you at least have no experience trying to play on such servers. I saw somebody suggest that it was easier to play on a pirate server than a live Blizzard server and I will tell you that is some straight up ignorant bullshit nonsense right there.

Yes, in the end, this is a business. But pretending there is some equivalence between a pirate server and what Blizzard would produce is to start off with some bogus assumptions when making a business plan.

“I saw somebody suggest that it was easier to play on a pirate server than a live Blizzard server and I will tell you that is some straight up ignorant bullshit nonsense right there.”

Azuriel said that in his post on playing a Paladin on an illegal Vanilla server. I read him saying it just today!

As for myself, while it remains true that I wouldn’t want to play slowed-down, increased difficulty version of the exact same content available on Live on any MMO even I wouldn’t discount the attraction of That New Server Smell. I might sub up for one month just to see the fun. When you’re WoW, just that level of curiosity could be worth millions of dollars.

I’m going with the conspiracy that someone wants this to fail so they can say “we told you it wouldn’t work, now leave us alone”.

How would this pristine garbage can of a server be harder? It would be slower, but the Cata content would be the same faceroll junk it was before. The game was easy long before heirlooms and such made it even easier.

Regardless the fact remains that this is either just a stall tactic, and they hope this blows over, or its something they do to justify not actually doing vanilla servers correctly.

I would love to see a vanilla server. I would probably resub for it and just go hang out in Auberdine for hours, just drinking it in.

And, the blue post does give me a little hope. One, because it was J. Allen Brack and not Tom Chilton. Two because, unless he is making it up out of whole cloth, “From active internal team discussions to after-hours meetings with leadership, this subject has been highly debated.” sounds like a real thing that happens.

But it also makes me think that the design and planning is the real hard part. Technical challenges can be overcome. People do that all the time. Throw a small team of smart developers in a room and slide pizza under the door occasionally and I promise they’d be done inside of six months.

The hard part is figuring out the design.
If they start on Vanilla (world and classes) do they reintroduce all the old bugs?
Do they just run the current code with the old world? I think that has great risk of exposing bugs caused by code never meant to to run against a certain world version.
What if a previously undiscovered game-breaking bug is found in the old code? All three of these items eventually lead to a forked WOW codebase, which sounds nightmarish.
Do they introduce expansions? If so, when? (I don’t think Daybreak’s idea of voting for expansions is viable long-term, because you run out of expansions. Then again, it’s better than nothing).
If they don’t introduce updates, there will be a large section of people waiting until they introduce a BC server. Or Wrath. Or Cata. Etc.
If the server(s) becomes a ghost town due to the above, or the exhaustion of nostalgia, do they turn off the servers? That would then alienate the small core of hardcore vanilla-ites.

I’m pretty sure everyone in those “after-hours meetings” has a different viewpoint on the above and other issues, and getting everyone behind one plan is an enormous challenge they have to deal with before installing a single piece of code on a prospective vanilla server.

I’m saying that the number of long term nostalrius players was quite a bit less than 150k, which is the number people use to lobby Blizzard on this topic. I have no idea how many users it would take to turn a profit for Blizzard on this, but I highly doubt the number of people playing an official vanilla server is going to be much higher than what the private servers gather. People who pine for vanilla overlap pretty heavily with people who know about these servers.

@Matt – And I disagree strongly. I think an official stamp on that sort of server would bring out a lot of people dubious of the illegality of pirate servers. That, and the fact that such servers have to keep something of a low profile adds up to a pretty big barrier. I would admit that anybody really hardcore dying to play on vanilla is probably on such a server, but there is a lot of space between there and those who have no interest at all in vanilla.

The anecdotal story I have is that out of our five person regular WoW group, I am the only one who would dive into a pirate server. The rest said if it were official, they would join in too, but the dubious nature of such servers were a barrier. This is what you get when you group with lawyers.

And even your own data point, the poll over at MMO Champion, seems to indicate that a far larger group is interested in something else out of WoW than its current trajectory. Vanilla is a subset of that, but still likely not an insignificant minority. And, as we have seen with EverQuest, EverQuest II, and RuneScape, such servers can be popular and bring people back to the game.

Still, it probably isn’t going to be an issue. I have a strong suspicion that Blizzard’s post today is the corporate response equivalent of my parents saying we’ll discuss something later; they just don’t want to say “no” right now when passions are high. They’ll bring us a new expansion in a few months and hope that makes everything better.

And, adding to that, there is a very vocal “no special servers” group out there as well who, rightly given past experience, fear than any new project will just make getting content for the live servers just that much slower.

Well blizzard has certainly been taken by surprise.
I personally do not know about legal matters but the fact that the nostalrius team immediately told that they WILL release their code or commit it back to mangos GPL project must have caused IMMEDIATE heartbreaks/strokes. Can you imagine the sheer amount of servers opening in the following weeks/months after that. We are talking about PR and Legal meltdown.

I honestly believe they are working their asses off at blizzard trying to find a way to legally bind that team from ever releasing that code but we all know that sharing a bunch of files off the internet CANNOT be stopped no matter how hard they try.

I don’t know if it will be easy to shut down a “educational” mangos project running under GPL, since it contains just server code and struct responses. Yea the map objects were “retrieved” from the client but they are in such a format now that it is absolutely impossible to prove that.

To conclude the post is just a way to stall and try to convince the pirate crew to reason. It all depends on whether they like the pristine server idea or if it can be bent to their liking.

I think the main problem for Blizzard would be on the support side, not the technical side. If you’re playing on a pirate server run by enthusiasts, you are much more likely to forgive a bug or some other technical problem that shows up than if you play on an official server run by a big rich company.

Sure, they have the people to deal with those situations, but it’s still people they would have to divert from other projects, people that would have to learn how the code from 12+ years ago worked, …. and that’s neither easy nor fast.

For myself, I wouldn’t mind having the option to revisit the existing pre-cataclysm quests that were removed when they redid the 1-60 experience, but I’ll admit that it’s for nostalgia’s sake only and not content I’d like to do over and over. I’ve already lost enough time trying to find all the lost pages of Stranglethorn or running (not riding or flying) all the way from Auberdine to the south of the zone and back just to be sent a bit further away next time for who knows how many times…

What made great WoW back then was the group of players I hanged out with, and those have moved on, so I’d rather stay in the current version of the game where even if I mostly play solo I can still experience nearly all the content in the game.

On the subject of how easy or hard it is to play on a private server: Pointing the client at the right server, making an account and logging in is all fairly easy, but the tricky thing is getting the client. Azuriel seems to be used to torrenting all kinds of stuff, but if you’re not… I for one ended up having to go to some dodgy-looking site where everything was in Czech and my internet security warned me off repeatedly, and because I refused to register with them, the download took eight hours. I would consider that a not inconsiderable hurdle to playing. :P

I do not see the Pristine server as a good solution to this issue. Playing through the Cataclysm content slightly slower (slower =/= harder) will not address the appeal of those wanting a classic WoW levelling experience. More fundamentally I think Blizzard needs to accept that they’ve damaged the levelling experience by the drastic class rebalances around various level-caps. Some classes can one-shot mobs right through to the last couple of expansions (e.g. Monk, Warrior)!

The questing content may be polished but the speed (super-fast) and difficulty (non-existent) doesn’t make for a good gameplay experience IMHO. I’m suppose Blizzard don’t really think of levelling as being equal in importance to raiding but it’s such a colossal waste of all that content to neglect the gameplay from 1-90 to this extent. Two friends and I recently levelled old characters through Pandaria to get them started on Draenor and even that, the closest expansion by level, is now face-roll easy. You can level from 85-90 in just over 2 of the zones!

“(flying) only in Outland after 60”
what are you? a wrath baby? flying in outland at 70 please.

I dont want to play cataclysm from 1-60. i want vanilla. i want 1000g epic mounts. i want no mount till 40. i want the shaman totem quests and rogue poison quest. i want 5 hour BRD runs. i want more than 3 boss, non-linear dungeons. i want to have to find soemone with a scholo key or a rogue. i want to join alterac valley and find it is the same one i left 24 hours ago. i want the AQ gate opening resource grind event. i want stranglethorn vale questing pvp and barrens chat. the blood plague is a bit much to ask for as is the bring the bomb to the AH bug but one can dream.

the problem with a new historic wow server built now is that it would be built by the team that brought you garrisons. if they thought that was a good idea what will they do to vanilla?

best you could hope for is a current server with a hard level cap at 60. an ilvl restriction of any BC item or higher with a balance pass done on every raid and dungeon. dont ever patch that server but release a 2nd one with similar settings but for BC and eventually each other expansion. allow character transfers off vanilla to BC server and any other higher sever so a group or individual can decide their own progression pace though my guess is people would prefer a reroll than getting rid of their raid geared toon to a higher teir. every 2 or 3 years reset one so it is a complete fresh start and disable transfers to it for a year.

People saying that torrenting stuff is some sort of archaeic ritual only for the initated is mind boggling. Where I live everyone torrents stuff, from TV series, to movies, to games to books… everything. And I’m talking about people that the only thing they know about PCs is Facebook and double clicking icons on the desktop. Those same people cannot use Netflix, but they will download entire seasons of TV to watch.

Getting the 1.12 client simply imvolves googling “wow 1.12 client torrent” and you also get the sites for the more popular servers at the same time.

Blizzard seems to be bored with WoW and rather drains its resources on OverWatch and such (something the ‘no special ruleset servers!’ crowd likes to ignore), and are indeed probably just stalling and damage-controlling with this half-assed offer that almost literally means just flipping a couple of switches if it even gets done.

In general I find it a bit perplexing that the moment they might actually have to put in some work (they fed a similar line with e.g. levelling PvP being a total mess since Cataclysm removed Skill Ranks, and organised player outcry rose up to get it fixed) they balk at it. Call me blunt but aren’t they paid for doing sthat are difficult?

But I guess it can be called a plus that at least the idea of (more) special rule-set servers has taken ground (even if years after EQ and DAoC did it)

@NetherLands – Yeah, I was not impressed with their statement where they literally said if it was easy they would do it, but since it isn’t, they won’t. And Blizz having finally taken notice after all these years… well, the word “hubris” comes to mind. They probably never thought they would have to stoop to that… and then subscriptions dropped in half and, despite being pestered for it for years, they had no backup plan.

@jarhead – Sorry, I meant 70 and 78. I would have said no flying at all, except both expansions have content that require flight.

@tithian – So everyone you know is a criminal? You just wrote that they all happily steal content. And, while I am sure they all have some puffed up justification akin to “everybody cheats on their taxes” or “everybody lies on their resume” to make themselves feel better, in the end they are stealing. I am no fan of the MPAA or the RIAA or companies like UbiSoft who think literally everybody is stealing from them, but “torrents = theft” isn’t a huge logical leap either.

So, no, the technical means for installing and using BitTorrent are not a huge barrier, though your “Facebook only” people got help doing it I am sure, but there is also a moral chasm to jump there. Meanwhile, I hope you don’t have to support those Facebook level users when they download some innocently titled item that turns out to contain malware. All those situations end up in my lap in our family.

@wilhelm since you know your way around software development, implementing this would be extremely easy for blizzard.
ALL open source ‘cores’ get EVERYTHING from the client right now. Why blizzard decided to put the vmap/nmap files as well with the dbc files within the client is beyond me. So the map files are required to implement path-finding (and LoS for spells) or generally where you can go or not in the map. The dbc files contain ALL of the game “rules”, the location of graveyards, the dialogs of npcs and whatever else you can think of.

For some reason the game itself ignores all of these files and everything is coordinated through the server so all those files are completely irrelevant but they are still within the client.

Here comes the catch. THEY ARE USING THE SAME THING even on current patch in wod.
There is trinitycore for 6.2.4 out and any dev in that community can confirm this. My understanding is that both the map files and the dbc files format has not changed at all over the years. The hard part is to port those dbc files into a db or reverse engineer them to a format that your software understands.

So all in all their current server sure has a lot more features in but they will NEVER have to reverse engineer the dbc files themselves because they already have the code for that. They will just need to restructure their login server to connect to battle.net v2 that is obviously a billing platform now on top of a network.

Or else they indeed will have to remake the old executables to make them compatible with the platform so that it checks your battlenet account for credentials and stuff. But that i say could be handled by the login server. They would only need to have a separate server for the legacy client logins. It would be as easy as changing your realmlist text file now.